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zephenlast Monday at 7:00 PM2 repliesview on HN

Lattner is a smart guy, but I think Mojo might be the wrong direction.

Time will tell.

History has not so far been kind to projects which attempt to supplant cPython, whether they are other Python variants such as PyPy, or other languages such as julia.

Python has a lot of detractors, but (despite some huge missteps with the 2-3 transition) the core team keeps churning out stuff that people want to use.

Mojo is being positioned "as a member of the Python family" but, like Pyrex/Cython, it has special syntax, and even worse, the calling convention is both different than Python, and depends on the type of variable being passed. And the introspection is completely missing.


Replies

0xpgmtoday at 8:10 AM

I don't think they intend to supplant cPython, but to make it easier for someone to take a piece of software written in high-productivity Python and make it more performant on specialized hardware by using a similar syntax.

Long term it can find applications outside of ML-specific hardware.

tucnaklast Monday at 10:51 PM

Honestly, I feel like Julia might as well beat Mojo or sommat to the punch, sooner or later. It has some facilities and supporting infrastructure for a lot of scientific and data-handling tasks surrounding ML, if not for compiling and dispatching kernels (where XLA reins supreme to anything in the CUDA ecosystem!) For example, Bayesian programming like Turing.jl is virtually unmatched in Python. It's been a while since I looked at Lux.jl for XLA integration, but I reckon it could be incredibly useful. As long as LLM's and RLVR training thereof should continue to improve, we may be able to translate loads of exiting Pytorch code eventually.

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